Marble Integration

Things are coming along nicely for the contacts plasmoid. While a short vacation slowed things down a bit, I worked on contact source abstraction in the last days which resulted in a kaddressbook integration. In the long run decibel/akonadi will take care of that as well, but for now you can choose among contacts from Kopete and the standard address book.

To work on something more visually pleasing, I gave marble a try this evening. The idea is to display all contacts with a known location (here provided by kaddressbook) in a common map. Thanks to the nice marble API, a first version is already done:

Next things to do are making the marble contacts widget configurable and look less ugly (better zooming level, rounded corners, maybe remove the small map if possible).

Really great. It’s nice and useful. I would keep the small map. If possible I would make it visible by hovering over a certain place in the map or would even try to make the whole map only visible if a certain place in the widget is touched. You could also consider to integrate the local time of the contact person. Might be very handy i.e. in business.

You might need to call “update()” ( or the much more expensive “updateChangedMap()” ) after that, but first try without it.

if you prefer to have the zooming levels match the original zoom level for the tiles: that’s something we’d like to have added as a feature in MarbleWidget. Just join us on #kde-edu and discuss it with (“jmho”) who is responsible for the OSM support or discuss it with me (“tackat”).

Inge: Of course “removing the plugin” (as in removing the file) would make the plugin also disappear in the Marble application, so this is not a real choice. Better go with setting it invisible.

OlJi: That’s indeed a good suggestion. However the size is definetely too big. So another option would be to make it smaller. That’s possible, too. Just choose the source code above to set the plugin invisible and replace